Lord, I Believe

March 6, 2005 (Fourth Sunday in Lent)

by The Rev. Bryan England, Deacon

- 1 Samuel 16:1-13
- Psalm 23
- Ephesians 5:1-14
- John 9:1-38

Lent is about temptation: the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, even the temptation experienced by you and I as we try to keep our Lenten disciplines. Lent is also about faith: the faith of Abraham leaving everything behind and following the voice of God into a new country, the faith of Samuel seeking a new king in an unlikely place. Lent is also about belief, and interestingly enough, faith and belief are not the same thing.

Today's Gospel lesson starts by posing a theological question. Jesus encountered a man who had been blind from birth, and the disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

The theological doctrine at work here is called "Occasionalism," and it says that God alone is the real actor in all events. There are no accidents; there is no happenstance, no human control of events. Everything happens because God has ordained it to happen that way for some reason. You hear it expressed today when someone loses a loved one, especially when it is an extremely tragic and unexpected loss. A child dies in an accident, and we hear someone say, "God took him home." We're left trying to come up with an explanation for why a supposedly loving God would do something so hideous. It's one of the more fun parts of being clergy.

Occasionalism was a driving force in early Hebrew thought. Since God was the moving force behind everything, if something very good happened to a person or the nation, it must be a reward for righteousness. Conversely, if something very bad happened, it must be a punishment for sin. When the Hebrew armies were defeated in battle at Ai, Joshua knew that it couldn't be that he was a crummy general. Someone must have sinned, and God sent this military defeat as a punishment. Sure enough, when Joshua investigated, he found that someone had looted forbidden objects from the battle of Jericho and buried them under his tent. Happily, though, after the sinner and his whole family were stoned to death and burned up, the Hebrew armies were once again victorious in battle.

So it was very logical for the disciples to ask whose sin was the cause of this poor man being born blind. Was it his parents, or did he somehow manage to sin before he was even born?

Jesus responded that nobody's sin had caused his affliction, but because he had been born blind, the works of God would be revealed. And the works of God are healing. Jesus is the light of the world, and in the presence of that light, healing happens, whether physically, or emotionally, or spiritually.

But sometimes God moves in very mysterious ways. Put yourself in the blind man's shoes. He is sitting at the outskirts of the temple, minding his own business and plying his trade as a beggar. Someone he doesn't know comes by and instead of ignoring him, as do some, or giving him a coin as do others, the stranger stops, mixes saliva and dirt together then smears the mud on the blind man’s face, then tells him to go wash it off in a pool across town. This was fairly weird even by the standards of the day. Can you imagine the reactions he got from people as he stumbled about asking for directions to the Pool of Siloam, this blind man with mud smeared over his eyes?

But the blind man went. Why? Nowhere in today's lesson does it say that the blind man had any sort of faith in the healing power of God, it doesn't even say that he knew who Jesus was. But he did have something. As the authors of the commentary I use state, he was "radically willing." He was willing to believe, he was willing to be made to look the fool, he was willing to do anything he had to do for the possibility of gaining his sight.

I heard a bishop from another diocese once state that Western Christianity is comfortable, complacent, and expects little. We come to church week after week, we pray daily for healing for ourselves and others, but we don't expect anything to be different as a result. The blind man was different. He went to the pool expecting to be healed; otherwise he would not have gone at all. And he came back able to see.

Ironically, when he returned from the Pool of Siloam, the formerly blind man was greeted by the blindness of others. Neighbors who had known him all of his life argued about whether it was the same man or not. It looked like him, but he was born blind. This guy could see. It couldn't be the same man.

In their confusion they took him to the Pharisees, but the Pharisees were just as confused. If this were the same man, then Jesus restored his sight, but how could he have? That would take a miracle from God, and Jesus couldn't be from God because he didn't play by the same rules the Pharisee's did. Jesus wasn't a Pharisee, and everybody knew that God was a Pharisee. So this supposedly former blind man had to be someone else, an imposter.

Or wait a minute! Maybe he never was blind! Maybe he was just pretending to be blind so he could laze around and beg instead of working for a living! The Pharisees brought in the blind man's parents, "Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?" The parents threw up their hands. We know it's our son, and we know he was born blind, but that's all we know. He's old enough to speak for himself, ask him!

So the Pharisees drug the formerly blind man in again and raked him over the coals once more. That man couldn't have cured you, they say, we know he's a sinner! But the beggar didn't know if Jesus was a sinner or a saint, and didn’t care. The only thing I know, he says, is that "though I was blind, now I see."

The reality of his gift of sight opened the beggar's eyes to a greater reality. He tells the Pharisees, "Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing." But rather than open their own eyes to the greater truth, the Pharisees drove him out.

Finally, at the end of what was probably a pretty full day for the formerly blind man, Jesus sought him out and asked, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" It was a loaded question.

Marcus Borg has pointed out that the phrase "believe in Jesus" has lost it oomph. Today the word "believe" is defined as having a firm religious faith. Indeed the words belief and faith are almost synonymous. But Jesus was not asking the once blind man if he had faith in him. The word "believe" in its original Greek, pisteuo, meant "to give one's heart to." Jesus was asking the man, "Do you give your heart to me." And the once blind man responded, "Pisteuo, Kyrie." "Lord, I believe." And he worshiped him.

The same question is asked of us at our baptisms, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?" And, again, it is a loaded question. Do we have faith, do we believe in the stories about Jesus we have been told in our lives, do we accept the doctrines of the Church, our catechism? Or have we given our hearts to the Son of God? When we stand in a few moments to reaffirm our collective faith, are we merely reciting the Nicene Creed, or are we joining with the blind man in today's Gospel lesson in giving our hearts to the one who healed us? May we all have the grace to answer Jesus' question the way the blind man did, "Pisteuo, Kyrie!" Lord, I believe!

Amen.